Player Councilor Election 2021

nine2

Reminder all posts will be deleted except applications.

Morax

Once again, Morax, here on the Council of Setons campaign trail.

I want to start by stating what I think the Player Council should be in a few simple statements before I get onto key duties, responsibilities, and plans for current or future issues to address.

If the formatting of the message board post bothers you, please feel free to read on my Google Doc.

What is the Player Councilor?

The player councilor should be the voice of the community who takes every minute they work in the position to express the desires and what makes people in the community happiest. This person should uphold the task of taking all the complex language and technicalities such as TrueSkill rating and explain it in layman terms to those who are interested, all the while providing an optional media (written report, video, etc) that demonstrates all the details for those interested. It should be a person who not only works on the community but as well actively plays with the community to better experience the choices made.

My Previous Experience As M&M Council And How it Applies for Player Councilor

For nearly 2 years I was the maps and modifications community councilor where I spent a majority of the time helping people and creating a learning tool. My best achievements - in my opinion - were creating a series of documents that had a list of all the references and tutorials possible. This was a necessary step in figuring out what the community knows - together - so that we can move forward and improve.

For those interested, you can see the compilation of documents below:

Mapping Resources

Modification Resources

If you look at the #mapping-resources channel in the primary discord, this has been updated from my own list and improved by biass (thanks for doing that! Looks great!).

This is not an application for the Maps & Modifications council, but this style is one example of how I would like to apply my didactic and helpful nature to the player council. There is a lot of need - in my opinion - for things like game strategy, new player tutorials, and other “how to do this in the community” which I believe currently is a bit lacking. The unified Discord is a wonderful step in the right direction, yet there is more detail and direction needed there.

That said, here are my thoughts and hopes for the Player Council role in detail ahead.

Tournaments & The Legend of the Star(s)*

Events and viewership of them is a pinnacle part of the community, encouraging plenty of discussion and fun of the drama as it unfolds. I began running WWPC alongside a player named Lextoc - who quite coincidentally taught me most of what I know - and it was a blast. I looked through this old thread and it made me realize a lot of the “top players” came from this.

As exciting as the top player events are, I kind of want to take a step back and work on some other types of events - AS WELL - that are critical to other features of the game: TMM, learning (lower player stuff and balance, and anything extraordinary like the mapgen. I IN NO WAY intend to lower my dedication to the competitive player scene as it was always something I enjoyed. Those of you who know me well know I for many years have put a lot of time, money, and effort into this.

Some of my favorites were donating to Legend of the Stars, 2v2 Master Cup, 3v3 Trident of Power, and tons of Blitz events or the likes. My loyalty to those who spend the most time becoming the best of the best is true and will always stay, yet I just feel like the Player Council need to celebrate all aspects of levels.

Legend of the Star(s):

This tourney in particular is the year end celebration of FAF in my opinion, and it needs to constantly be made better and better to uphold the kindness and generosity of blind donors like Legend who gives and allows the community to run it the way they see fit. With his permission, and others that play and donate, I would like to propose a new concept for this event: A “majors” and a “minors” that run in parallel.

At the beginning, these events were loaded with players of all levels and slowly the top players picked up seeds through a series of “Qualifiers.” Most of the time, people who play these who are not at the top pretty much pray that they are matched against someone of equal level, even with the seeding introduced by Blodir a couple years ago. Rather than do this, I think similar to sports and other leagues that a major and minor (do not quote me on this) O1900 and U1900 be implemented. The money, FAF Live, and everything will mainly focus on O1900 of course; however, those who feel it interesting to see “up and coming” stars could be free to do so. I think this will make the “Legend of the Stars” true to its name rather than the “Legend of The Star.”

The format otherwise is pretty good as-is, so am not certain of any other types of changes. I realize this concept is and will be a bit controversial, and am eager to hear the community’s reaction. I just think it would be great for up and coming players - or those who cannot achieve the highest level - to have fun and see where they stand. Who knows? Maybe if someone wins the U1900 of the LoTS it will motivate them to graduate on up and be a true “pro.”

It gives people a chance to get tourney experience they might not elsewhere...

If it becomes obvious people do not like this idea, we can scrap it and try other stuff.

Ladder & Team Matchmaker

This is a tough area to cover as subjectivity is VERY HIGH as every and all players really have different preferences of play styles. The map pools are made with a great effort in current, and the one thing I would change is this:

Limit the # of new maps to 1 to 2, have a community feedback thread for new maps to see if people like it BEFOREHAND rather toss it into the pool.
No rating resets, ever again. The global rating system is known to have its flaws, yet it has never been reset, so why do that with another one?
Openness and transparency with map ratings rather discuss the actions and reasonings for why what maps go into the pool behind closed doors
No more numerical-based polling: the community size and motivation to play ladder is really small, for instance, and could likely be personally interviewed, with feedback posted to a thread. This does not need to be complicated and short of dysfunctional maps, it should be easy to discuss matters. I suspect it will have some rules and discussion points much like the “before you post in the balance team” except perhaps a little less strict…

TMM is really critical to help finalize the return of “Galactic War.” It started out as a stepping stone as it requires matchmaking much like TMM does, so it became a reality thanks in hand to interest by the developers and a push by the player council.

My advantages to the handling of map pools:

I know how to make and edit maps so outsourcing checking them will not be necessary, but appreciated
I play ladder fairly frequently and get to experience the maps first-hand

Training of Players and Resources

The training program in FAF for players interested in learning to improve their skills is rather poor in current. After interviewing the trainers it appears very little activity is being kept up on this task. I want to make this a BIG DEAL and find a way to engage with new or desiring players to get it going. Much like the “mapping, modding, unit modeling” resources posted at the beginning of this application, I would like to entertain one for game knowledge.

I would approach this by collecting any and all references such as the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uPjOxCTEng

This is still a great video albeit a bit dated, yet do you see anything about how to perform reclaim activities listed anywhere? Perhaps I am wrong, but it was not obvious to me when I went looking, spare knowing this particular video existed.

To show how I will make videos myself, you can see one of my tips and tricks here:
[ will update and link once YouTube gets it finalized so the resolution and 60 fps work… ]

It really blows my mind that in the amount of years FAF has existed there is not a concrete knowledge base with easy access. This will be one of my primary focuses early on, should I get elected.

Collaboration with Other Councils

Balance Council

This is a tough one as people are always going off on balance - myself included - and believe the community often feels left out of decision-making on how the game works in terms of balance or style changes. For the most part, I want to keep distant and let them do what they do as a team, but make it heard how people perceive that in a much more constructive manner.

How to do this?

Regular conversations with people in the balance team on up and coming changes and how to best inform the player base
Revive “balance testing tourneys”
Make demo videos if necessary to explain changes

I think for the most part the balance updates are very far and few between, so this should be relatively easy to coordinate and spend time on the tasks listed.

Petric, what do you think of this? Maybe if the “balance testing” tourneys show some real good data, we can make it a requirement to ensure it works outside of internal testing?

Promotion Council

Obviously in current the player council and promotion work on quite a bit of overlap. For me, the FAF Live should have been the primary duty of the promo council and the player council to support that. I am unsure of the total reasoning for this, but of course would be happy to help develop promotional content and share information of interest, or vice versa, what others find useful.

Development Council

This is of course a major responsibility of the player council. Not everyone understands or has the time to understand the complexity in operations within the development channels, and should be given an as easy-to-understand-AS-POSSIBLE reasoning for how they operate.

For example, the ladder and TMM pools show a sheet of “brackets” where a certain rating must be met in order to see those maps. It was discovered recently that it is not really that rating but is instead the “mu” which is often considerably lower than what was listed.

I will uphold the task of putting technical information in layman terms so it is simple and straightforward.

Moderation Council

In an effort to keep moderation of the community sound, I will without a doubt support Giebmasse’s ruling and decision-making. I believe the player councilor should interfere with these decisions at a minimal amount, but sometimes it becomes necessary to help facilitate issues.

Administrative, Game Code, Maps & Modifications

I turned the final 3 into 1 category because I do not have much to say about these other than the M&M council! I believe the M&M is working fine as I have seen what biass has done after my departure, would not change much.

Final Words

There is one thing I must admit: I am in much less of a state where I can play the game or work on the community as much as some other people. It saddens me to admit this, but I think if I play a little less and boost my commitment it will be sufficient. No one is paid in the community for what they do (heck, I lose money because of my donations haha!) so the time given is tough. I would estimate I play anywhere from 12-15 hours a week, so it would be pretty easy to give that up a bit.

That said, I really want to be more whole-encompassing and take on a more community-driven approach. I want to be the guy Aulex wrote about in the final post of this thread.

I spent a lot more time than recent in researching my posts, and see a lot of the concerns given by Petric here as still pertinent to today. I do not agree with everything stated, but he has some great points.

The competitive scene is important and will not be forgotten, but I think it has gotten a little bit too much attention over other matters recently.

I want to be the guy that helps everyone be heard and make FAF about fun again. It seems we may have lost a bit of that.

I pledge wholeheartedly to be the very best I can should I get enough votes to be the next Player Councilor of the Forged Alliance Forever community.

nine2

Thank you to our applicants. This thread is now open for civil discussions and debate.

The next step is:
21st of May: Signups closed, Council and Board review

Askaholic

One thing I want to say is that I think the candidates are severely over estimating the influence that the PC has over development. The dev team are all volunteers, we will work on the things that are fun/interesting for us and some PC coming in and telling people they need to rewrite xzy system "because I said so" is simply not going to happen.

The PC may request/suggest certain features from time to time (as may anyone) but there is no guarantee that it will be fulfilled.

Jip

The majority of gamers that play a game do not know what they want with the game. Suggestions on balance for example that make sense in some context can easily rip apart the balance in ten other contexts. Just check the balance forums before the new rules got in place. Same idea, different topic: maps that one person thinks is amazing, can be terrible in the mind of another. Just check this post for a good example.

The suggestion of @Suzuji to become this crowd-opinion-based-machine with regard to the matchmaker (or in general: make it more 'democratic') is not something that I'd want to see happening. You're never going to please everyone - have a vision on what you think should be ladder maps and let us vote on that.

There are some differences between the two (four?) applications that I'd like to mention:

FtxCommando: It is down to earth and concrete. The ideas to combat what he thinks is going wrong are clear.
Suzuji: A lot of 'I will' and 'will do everything in my power'. Words - if I've learned anything from the past three months of being my own company - are not worth anything until they are on unambiguously on paper. Your post is full of wishes, or intentions - but with a lot of them no concrete and no unambiguous idea on how to solve it. Therefore the majority of your application is essentially empty.
Francias: I am not 100% sure if you are the one Blackheart called 'Feather', but apparently you are banned? It feels like that if you wanted to change things you should've adhered to them, become PC, and then change them. Not get banned and then try and become PC.
Morax: it is down to earth and concrete. Similar to Ftx, but with a different perspective.

In my opinion the two only real applications are those of Ftx / Morax.

I don't play match making or the game itself enough to understand half of what all the applications consider a problem at the moment. As a mapper however: I think the PC (being the person that is ultimately responsible for adding maps to matchmaking) should have a clear opinion on what he / she thinks makes a ladder map good. A few examples:

Players should have clear expansions.
Players should have clear safe, expandable, raidable and contested extractors.
Players should have between A and B extractors of category Y.
Map should or should not be adaptive.
etc...

The reason for this is simple: I'm guessing as a map maker and I completely rely on the expertise of tournament players to help me out. I'd like to have an objective line to follow when thinking in terms of competitive maps. A line that should not be based on what people think in general is right, but on what the PC thinks is right for the pools for the next year. And this is something that people can vote on.

And I'd like to see a list of common things that can go wrong when you consider a map for ladder. Common annoyances that I therefore do not experience myself. I discussed this idea here and I'd like to see that grow somehow so that map makers in the future can at least look at the future list and make a conscious decision as to whether they support mechanic X or Y at location A or B on their map.

And again - this should be composed by the PC and not by the community - as a casual player will have wildly different ideas in comparison to competitive players. As an example this topic. I don't think this is something people should vote on, as these are more generic. But I'd like to see the list anyhow.

MrBeast

Ftx has proved to be quite good and normal, some moments do not suit me, but in general, the usual choice. I am also see a good projects like league, league tourneys, show a ways sponsoring real interesting and quality games , and upgrading high quality scene instead noobs games like gaps, astro and any <1800 low quality games.
Francias for me is unstability person.
Suzuji is most perspective person I should choose same as Ftx.
Morax I know he is good man, and sponsored some tourneys a lot of times, but I also know a some bad things like he doesn’t payed Nexus and Blodir prizes for some their tourneys(as I listen) , so i would not choose him, becouse person is placing self before real things.
Blodir, I have no idea is he going to post his candidate right there, but my position I write at his new post.

My opinion will be changed until elections. So if there a persons like me, still doesn’t know who better to choose u may like my post and maybe some discuss with me?
I will also add at this post soon smth new

Auriko

About matchmaking and map pools :
I think having a small team of diverse players (like we have now) who discuss and choose the map pool is the good solution. The PC having a vision of "what's a right map for ladder" is bad, cause if you don't like the pool you can then blame it on the subjective choices of one person.
I'd like however that the team shares their reasoning and discussions more with the player base as Morax offered. The polls adressed to the entire player base can be a reasonable option for the team to have more data on what people want ... if they participate enough ...

I'm afraid the idea N°4 of Morax (interviewing the player to have their opinion) will not be very practical for balancing the map pool, but hey it's just nice to have a PC who talks with the player base ...
On that account, francias and suzuji application feel very troll to me : i've been around for a year, and i've rarely seen any of them engaging discussions with the players .. can someone be Player Councillor if he has no interest in talking with other players ??

FtXCommando

@auricocorico said in Player Councilor Election 2021:
The polls adressed to the entire player base can be a reasonable option for the team to have more data on what people want ... if they participate enough ...

So on that topic, we have done polls for matchmaker pools in the past (you can see my collection of data in this thread https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1530/emerald-craters/11)

Problem is that you very quickly get into voter fatigue. I ran these polls for about 8 months or so. The first few had over 100 participants but by the end I was gathering around 15.

When you add in the time of setting them up, importing the data into some csv editor, and then handling the data, it just wasn’t worth it by the end.

On the bright side the data generally showed that matchmaker team and popular opinion weren’t that far off except for situations like 20x20s generally being disliked by players.

I’d say the only way to make polling viable both to prevent fatigue from the PC as well as fatigue from the people taking the poll is to condense it to 2 or 3 maps (the new maps basically) and ask people to simply rate those maps.

Auriko

Now i'm really upset about all the past dramas that we can read between the lines or on discord/aeolus :

Stories about tournament donation, tournament money
Some talk about "unreliable TD" i've seen in aeolus
The whole "Francias is Feather" discussion

I've not been around for long to know what this is all about, and it annoys me cause when discussing about the election with some players you're confronted with arguments like "this guy is a scam, he did that in the past", or "this guy gave tournament money to his friend, don't vote for him" .. etc.

I know it's part of the election to have some drama involved .. I don't want a full history of what happened during the past 10 years. But things like being banned for toxic behavior or hijack FAF money to give to friends, this is real serious accusations, and i don't feel like voting before all this has been exposed and answered ... I'm sorry to bring this annoying topic but it's kind of the elephant in the room ...

FtXCommando

Suzuji Response:

Matchmaker

I plan to dedicate a Discord section to discuss and debate matchmaking map pools so I can form a quick method of engaging with the community and get feedback from players of different levels.

This makes little sense as all it will result in is an additional barrier of entry for people to talk about anything related to matchmaker pools. It’s why I reversed from the idea and instead moved everything into the single, centralized FAF Discord server. You just end up talking to and getting maps from the same couple people that had the interest in joining a tertiary server. What is gained by directing players to one Discord, directing mappers to another Discord, and then saying oh but if you are a specific mapper OR player interested in anything related to matchmaker pools you actually need to go to this entirely different Discord server?

I will be surveying active ladder players, and delivering the information I have gathered to map creators, which in some cases will allow them to build a map around actual gameplay rather than aesthetics. Therefore, the ladder pool can be updated with quality maps faster.
I will encourage new players to use the matchmaker more often, and will do everything in my power to improve the experience they get from the game.

So first off, this is already done for mappers. Maps get put in for review and are criticized and given adjustments to improve their gameplay, aesthetics, and variance. Failure to accommodate criticism results in a map not being put in, simple.

With regards to players, how do you encourage them? How is the experience made better? By surveying players and seeing what they like? There are players across all rating brackets that enjoy tons of 5x5 and no 20x20, or love 20x20 and hate 5x5. There is a general trend where these two groups decrease/increase in size as you increase in rating and it’s what the map brackets are currently based on. The only way to make the experience anything more than marginally better from what it is now is by using a choice pool that operates through map vetos. I talk more about this below.

I also plan to return the veto system, with the intention that it does not reach its logical extreme.

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16383&start=10

A system outline for how a choice pool (with veto) has existed since 2018. It does not mean the developer manpower to implement the entire different UI that would need to accompany said system exists. Now with matchmakers (that didn’t exist in 2018) we would also need to rework how some of these systems work in order to accommodate not only different team sizes but also the additional factor of some teams being random and some being premade. However, I’ve already planned out the way it can under the hood, mainly, a point based veto system.

After thorough deliberation, I will organize matchmaker map sheets based on players' preferences.

This already exists.

After making a discussion concerning this topic, I will be bringing a map pool of at least 200 maps.

After discussion with you it seems you just want to make a 200 map pool and either never touch map pools again or very rarely touch them to rotate a few maps out. I do not understand what this is supposed to accomplish.

If you want to make a pool where map prep means zero, then make a map gen pool. Adding 180 maps does almost nothing for the average user on ladder who plays for approximately 4-5 hours a month and will never hit 9 let alone 20 maps, god forbid anything more. Thomas can’t even manage to hit all 20 maps in the map pool in a month.

I also don’t understand WHAT discussion you expect to happen with a 200 map pool. You will be scrapping the absolute pit of the map vault in order to gain 200 maps. It’s what I had to do to reach the current number of like 230ish 1v1 maps I have (and probably 20-25% of even these were marked as too bad to play anyway since the team either saw the gameplay as too bad or the general player reaction to seeing these maps were unfavorable).

Training

On a regular basis, I will assist players in the training channel. And whenever possible, I will give personal advice when complications occur.

You’re never there as it is. Why would I believe this would change as PC? It’s probably the lowest barrier to entry thing to do on this entire list.

At the request of the players, I will review their replays to conduct an analysis of their
gameplay, provide them with advice to avoid further mistakes to the best of my ability.

Again, you don’t do this as is even when there is great demand for people to do the work, why would it change now? It doesn’t require any level of organizational effort to do nor any permission from anybody. In fact it’s just a repetition of the responsibilities above, really.

I’ll be planning on making tutorials if the situation requires it.

That would be great, it’s been severely lacking and I have been unable to find someone interested in crafting tutorials for the general pool of maps that <300 players get.

TrueSkill:

From the very beginning of the game, I had serious questions about the TrueSkill system, and how easily many hosts abuse it.

Then you should understand that it’s impossible to create a custom game system where TrueSkill can work without making it extremely and needlessly complicated for the end user.

Moreover, as a beginner player, I remember how you were treated when you have a black rating, and literally being kicked from all the hosts, and even those who host all welcome games can see it as a reasonable decision.

This is why we created and plan on expanding the Matchmakers while also are doing autohosts on map gen maps where new players can join and launch games without being kicked. It’s also ideally intended to be helped via the Division system where players feel less fearful and anxious over their performance over the last game or two. Are there other solutions?

Of course, now I have completely learned the system, but I want to say that it is very difficult for new players to understand it, and in addition, simply writing on the forums what TrueSkill is, will not be enough. (Since probably not everyone uses it) Therefore, I plan to use various methods to create a comfortable environment where new players can more easily integrate into the system.

Methods like what? The methods to make TrueSkill easier and more intuitive are hiding it and replacing it with a more intuitive system. It’s what every game does with their MMR essentially. It’s what we’re trying to do. What’s the different plan?

I also plan to create a list of preferred maps for players with slow CPU to avoid further conflicts.

Sounds great but that’s also more in the Creative Councillor’s domain so you would be cooperating with him to do anything like that.

I will be planning to write a formula that will prevent generating unfair matches with high rated players against beginners. Such games not only do not provide any fun for high-rated players themselves but also discouraging for newcomers. To provide an example, the algorithm would work in a way, so that an 1800+ player would never be matched against a zero-rated player.

A quote from a post explaining the new matchmaking process from me 3 months ago:
“So first some definitions:
A top-level player is anyone with mu over 1600
A newbie is anyone with less than 10 games.
All teams with at least one newbie and no top-rated player will be matched randomly amongst each other if no decent game is initially found. If there are an odd number of newbie teams, the last newbie team can only match with a non-newbie team that has at least one failed matching attempt. If a team has a top-rated player, that team will not be eligible for random matching at all”

What you are upset about is the interpolation part of the matchmaking process. Which was weighed thusly:
Since 2013 there has been a massive complaint across FAF matchmaking about the level of skill that TrueSkill puts you up against in your first few games. This is because the intended bell curve peak is at 1500 mu, the current active peak is far off. This is due to a variety of deflationary aspects, mostly seen by the introduction of a biased initial sample during the initial early years of FAF (GPG players) and there being a surge of players that have almost zero exposure to the game.

The solution has been to place players at a lower than theoretically efficient level but what accommodates the real rather than theoretical FAF TrueSkill bell curve.

This in turn has harmed the 30 or so players that are above 1800+ that have now had the expectation of playing 10 “interpolation placement” games in order to regain the rating they used to have. I weighed these 30 players against the 400-500 new players I see play ladder/matchmaker each month (alongside the fact the negatives for the 1800+ being short term) and decided the interpolation was worth implementing regardless of those growing pains.

Tournaments

I will provide any assistance I can to TDs in their initiative to run the tournaments.

This already exists.

I will be planning to create events in the middle-level category to cultivate an interesting and competitive atmosphere that would potentially hook less experienced players into the gameplay.

Sounds good, but you also fail to explain anything about current events. Are you planning on personally hosting tournaments every month or every 2 weeks or are you cutting on tournaments currently in the FAF LotS Workshop thread? If you plan on doing this, it’s a huge sudden spark of motivation to do so when you have never hosted a single tournament in your entire 4(?) years on FAF.

I will do my best to prevent any potential conflict and look further to avoid violations regarding
Tournament Code of Conduct when the situation requires.

This already exists.

Players

To ensure that players remain in the FAF and are satisfied with their experience. I will aim to combat toxicity in the FAF community. Since I see it as something that hasn't been properly addressed before.

You have actively contributed to creating this toxic atmosphere in the past considering you have several bans for:
Teamkilling
Toxicity in chat
Smurfing
Intentionally losing games

I will address forum topics accordingly, surveil FAF activities in general, and intervene if necessary.

Sounds good, already done. You also don’t really seem very active on the FAF Forums at all. Would this also suddenly change when you’re PC?

I plan on actively reviewing replays, work to gather any valuable data, to see any issues that players might have regarding the balance changes. I will try hard to represent players' voice when it comes to opinion about the balance.

Could you be more specific here? What players? What replays? What is valuable data? What are you looking for exactly? Why do you promise this rather than a collaborative plan with Balance Team?

LotS:

I will be planning to collaborate with popular streamers to highlight LotS for a higher audience. And in the end, I want to find one specific streamer who will broadcast LotS for the linguistic segment, and do it as an event in the FAF client, to reiterate, that will allow to encompass a broader audience.

Putting a stream into the client requires dev work but there isn’t exactly a reason it would be technically unfeasible. After talking with you I see that what you mean by “linguistic segment” is working with a Russian streamer to stream events as a sort of Russian FAFLive for that audience. No one has a problem with this currently. In fact, I specifically made an exception for ZLO in the LotS streamer blackout because I recognized there was no Russian caster for Russian FAF and I had no one else to fill in the niche. By all means if someone wants to cover FAF events in Russian all they need to do is send me a PM on any of the FAF services I’m available for and I would work towards accommodating them and even attempt to give them the same streamer tools we are using for FAFLive as it is.

I welcome attempts to collaborate with popular streamers, but BRNK has no interest in working with anything officially part of FAF. Gyle has no time to do anything. And Yuri has no interest in covering 1v1 gameplay which he considers too boring. This is based on the years of attempting to get “the big 3” to cover events. FAFLive is the attempt to concentrate the various audiences of high level streamers and reach out to casual audiences under a single channel. It also serves the additional purpose of giving a selling point for sponsors and advertisers that there is a baseline with little volatility for their product.

I will do my best to inspect thoroughly the environment around LotS, and make sure there are no potential issues regarding the event, as well as do everything possible that everything runs smoothly and without logistical complications.
I will aim to uphold all the current responsibilities regarding LotS that current PC performs.

Sounds good, it’s everything I already do, but I have seen no reason to believe you would suddenly develop the motivation to spend the time I do. Again, you have never even hosted a single tournament for FAF nor approached me about anything relating to them.

Developers:

Quite a long time has passed since the moment when the galactic war system was removed, and many things have changed, and many people interested in GW have left the FAF project altogether. Therefore, I plan to arrange a series of polls in order to understand at all whether the players need a project of galactic war or not, and, if possible, reallocate development resources in a more necessary direction.

You have no ability to reallocate development resources. Developers work on what they are interested in doing or you build up the good will for a developer to trust that working on what you think is good will be of interest for FAF.

It also doesn’t matter what your poll says. Several devs have wanted to make GW for years, they are going to do it purely because they find it fun to do and it doesn’t matter if few on FAF want it (which isn’t true anyway).

If you wanted to poll anything, it would be about what to include with GW and how to include GW without harming other ecosystems of players. But these are hardly poll questions and instead need to be solved through discussions between people informed both of the issues surrounding the FAF playerbase and general game/ui design. It needs a coherent objective or niche in the FAF client that it is working to fill/solve and it needs a variety of systems/tools inherent within it that reach those objectives.

Since I am very interested in the Division system, and therefore I will do my best to help the developers in any way I can.
I will be planning on watching replays of the matchmaker games, and personally use matchmaker search system to detect any technical issues.
I should be able to provide any assistance to developers that is potentially required from PC at a moment's notice during primetime.

Sounds good, this is for the most part what I already do barring the regularly searching for games kappa.

FAF Promotions

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll plan to get access to different resources with the presence of the target audience. Also, I will try to reach out to different media, and potentially hook them to FAF to a higher extent, as a small example, I will be searching and providing individually unique replays that other casters didn't review in their video, if that suits them. I have been hypothesizing for a long time about possible methods of attracting contributors and media to the FAF project, so with motivation as a PC, I will plan to implement them so that more players interested in the RTS genre would be aware of the features of the Supreme Commander and the FAF project.

This is all mostly too vague to comment on. You have done zero work in this area for FAF and have presented entirely paperthin statements here that give me zero confidence you have a thought out plan of action. The only thing with merit is providing replays to casters, which is commendable and without problem. What are the plans for targeted outreach? What sources of media are you going for? Where are FAF players mainly present? Where are potential FAF players present? How is it most efficient to target them? What are the qualitative descriptions of the audience you are going for? Have you looked into anything like Google Analytics and the best terms to bid for in order to reach other audiences? Hell, have you thought about how an ad for FAF should even look like?

Most of this work is also currently the responsibility of the Promotions Councillor.

Democracy:

I will stand for:
Make FAF community more open and friendly.
Make FAF more democratic.

Democracy - control of an organization or group by the majority of its members.

This one particularly gets to me because I’ve worked to make FAF as democratic as I could make it. In fact, it was one of the things that specifically made me mad enough to want to take the position back in 2018. When I got elected, there was a grand total of 1 position open for direct election. When I was in Council, there were 3 that eventually got downgraded to 2 because the rest of the Council overruled my attempt to make the Promotion Councillor selection a direct vote.

Promotion Councillor selection when I was PC:
https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=16705&start=40

M&M Councillor before I was PC:
https://www.faforever.com/2018/04/m-m-councillor-and-discord-admin-update

M&M Councillor after I was PC:
https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17394

I’d also like to note that I’m the one that specifically pushed to make it so that it was clear each Councillor position could be put for an election if a contributor under them wished to do so. These elections would operate by being a closed vote between the contributors of that Councillor.

For instance, this is how we moved between the various Moderation Councillors under my terms as PC.

So I’m curious what exactly making FAF “more democratic” entails. Which Councillor are you going to be working to make directly elected by people as I’ve already worked to make every Councillor operate under the discretion of their contributive teams and worked to make as many Councillors directly elected as I could.

Conclusion:

You promise to offer FAF the best of your communication abilities. I do not see you on any official FAF communication medium.

Will you simply get the sudden drive to post in 10 threads a day on the forums once you get a green badge? Be highly active in the Discord? In Aeolus?

You promise to offer FAF large assistance in training programs and trainer assistance. I have never even seen you post an iota of training assistance whether it’s on guides on the forums, youtube, or the Discord.

Will you simply get the sudden drive to answer questions and create guides for 1-3 hours a day once you get a green badge?

You promise to not only meet my current level of tournament coverage but surpass it. This is with you never having hosted a single tournament in your 4 or so years on FAF.

Will you simply get the sudden drive to learn proper tournament creation, handling tournament coverage logistics, and tournament promotion once you get a green badge?

You promise to drastically improve the Matchmaker system. This is with you never even approaching me or anybody associated with the current system about how it works nor showing any interest in helping within the system. The lack of understanding of the current system is showcased in your proposed reforms of the system that have already been developed by me but tabled due to the lack of necessary manpower.

Will you simply get the sudden drive to spend time not only working with map authors to fix their maps for the matchmaker but also make pools and maintain map sheets once you get a green badge?

You promise to refine the TrueSkill system we currently use. I do not understand how this would happen when you have shown you don’t understand the way the system currently works by suggesting a solution that already exists. You have also not given any sort of concrete value adjustments or suggestions that are intended to lead to a superior system.

Do I think you have decent ideas here? Yes, it would be great to have people help create tutorials for the introductory maps lower rated players play. It would also be great to have curated replays that can be sent to casters. That last point is why I decided to incorporate a replays-to-cast channel on the Discord where casters can quickly scoop up a decent game given out by a credible player.

But if you haven’t even tried to implement some of those low initiative/cost ideas now (hosting some tournaments, being active in the training channel, etc), I fail to see why anything would change because you got a green badge.

You have 4 years of doing nothing related to any of this platform you posted. I have 3 years of massive investment into this project across all of these areas. The best path forward for FAF is you joining in to collaborate and learn how these segments of FAF operate and then in the future taking the mantle of managing them. If you have the motivation you claim to have in this post, then you’d not only be able to take a drastic weight off of my shoulders but have the ability to implement most of the ideas you’re advocating for here by working alongside me. As it is, I do not think it serves FAF’s interest to gamble on an entirely unknown entity.

Also:

Resistance

There is no need to waste your time on responding to the applications.
all of the applications will be taken and considered,wait for the final result.

biass

rezy-noob said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

There is no need to waste your time on responding to the applications.
all of the applications will be taken and considered,wait for the final result.

what? its a public vote?

archsimkat

I would like to start off by saying I have respect for each of the applicants as players, as individuals, and as members of the FAF community. Having serious and healthy competition for councillor positions is a good thing—elections give the incumbent councillor an additional incentive to do the best job he can do, aspiring councillors can contribute to prove their worth to the community, and the community as a whole only benefits as a result. With that in mind, I’d like point out what I think are issues with the applicants’ platforms.

@Suzuji, are you aware that:

the player councillor is not the promo councillor and the player councillor role is not the one to “reach out to different media, and potentially hook them to FAF to a higher extent”;
the player councillor does not have any special moderation authorities and a person does not need to be player councillor to “address forum topics accordingly, surveil FAF activities in general...” but the the player councilor does not have any special moderation authorities and cannot “...intervene if necessary”;
the player councillor does not act as a CEO of FAF and cannot just unilaterally “reallocate development resources in a more necessary direction”.

These are just things that are either not within the power of the player councillor, or just not related to the player councillor role, or just not possible in general.

Furthermore, are you aware that you do not need to be a player councillor to any of the following things you’ve listed? Training people; doing replay reviews; creating maplists; writing new matchmaking algorithms; finding replays for casters; hosting middle level tournaments; and helping TDs run tournaments. It would be more convincing to show stuff that you have previously done than give promises on what you would hypothetically do.

Finally, are you aware of the irony of saying “I will aim to combat toxicity in the FAF community. Since I see it as something that hasn't been properly addressed before”, when you yourself have been banned multiple times?

As of right now, I am left wondering—how I can know that you will keep your promises, considering that your promises amount to a full time job’s worth of work into FAF?

@Francias. I just don’t think someone that has been permabanned should be legitimately considered for player councillor, sorry.

@Morax, it seems to me your bid for player councillor was well thought out, so I am glad you spent the time to write this up. Since, in my eyes, this is basically a contest between you and FtXCommando.

You want LotS to feature a second unrelated tournament for lower rated players. By all means, go ahead and organise this—which, by the way, you can do even if you aren’t player councillor—but I just don’t see the point. It’s basically just a rating restricted tournament like any other. It doesn’t affect the main tournament, and since the coverage of LotS doesn’t even feature all the games from the main tournament, I can hardly see this changing too much from a viewer perspective.

Regarding the matchmaker, you were a part of the ladder team, and then left of your own volition. Are you trying to impose your vision of the matchmaker via an election instead of trying to collaborate with the rest of us on the ladder team?

The biggest issue I have with your application actually is with your history of withholding prize money. When Blodir and Nexus won the Shared Army Tournament 2 tourney in 2019, you withheld the prize money—that you had you had already pledged to donate. The fallout, where FtXCommando can be seen cleaning after the mess you caused, can be seen here:

This occurred again for the Dark Heart Tourney, once again the fallout can be seen below.

Not only that, this is clearly a recurring problem that is still ongoing because you also tried to take back the money you had already committed to Swkoll weeks in advance for the Spring Invitational in 2021, after the tournament was already underway. Will people have to be afraid of what they say around you? Can the community trust you to be responsible with the funds for tournaments and show matches?

Out of all the potential player councillor bids, FtXCommando's seems the strongest to me. He has spearheaded initiatives that have been a massive net gain for the community. Ladder league. FAFLive. League invitational tourneys. They have all been successes. Top level ladder activity is way up—just watch JaggedAppliance’s recent streams and see how much ladder content is available. The upcoming Division system is also promising. The key is that he has proven to able to put in the time and execute his vision. Why would I gamble on an unknown entity, when FtXCommando he has shown that he can do the job of Player Councillor, and do it well?

biass

So obviously as a councilor I do have questions for new appilicants. I also have some responses kind of like how FtX went about it just above me here. I'm going to ask a single item for the first round and then i'll dive into the real grilling later.

First, why are you here?
You've answered what you want to do. But why are you applying exactly?
Are you applying to do these things specifically, and why are you not doing them already?

Second, and more importantly;

More often than not, the primary role of the Player Councilor is to act as the beat-stick. The "Main tank" if you will. What i'm saying is that in the role, you'll cop a truckload of literal shit that you can't actually do anything about.
Examples:

If you get a bad map in ladder, FtX takes blame for it
If I flaked out on making promotion material for LOTS, FtX would have taken some blame despite there being a councilor role for it
FtX constantly takes flak for balance choices (hello inspector_kot)
If your suggestion doesn't get included because it was made in 30 seconds, FtX takes blame for being a tyrant
If someone in FtX's remotely close social circles gains any form of reward for work invested, FtX gets blamed for dishing out cash to his friends.
Someone who is a trusted mapper (including myself) makes a flaw in a map that is within a pixel of error and causes you an inconvenence, FtX takes blame for it
If the pool doesn't get swapped in time, FtX takes blame.
If you don't get money from the patreon in time, FtX takes the blame despite not holding the patreon

We can go on for a few hours but I think i've made my point here.

FtX has proof of his ability to tank for all this ignorant hatred, because of his current status AS the tank.
New applicants do not.

How do you expect to fare against the tide?
Do you think your past history as contributors here will reflect well on your chances?

Also, because i'm not going to be bothered to do this later:

Feather:
FAF is a constant burden on my mental health. This was always the case even before I became a councilor.
It is a burden because at it's heart, the lack of integrity and honesty on the platform is so low it borders on the sociopathic.

Even if you were a "changed man" who is unworthy of your current permaban,
and even if you had made some solid points in your application (you did not);

Your road to redemption will not start with you lying to my face.

I could see a councilor or maybe even a board member pulling a suicidal play to allow you to run because they had something against FtXCommando, so I actually considered perhaps responding to some of the points in your application. However, I would honestly rather just quit.

Please answer the questions promptly, so I can ask you more questions. Thanks boys.

BlackYps

What even is the problem here? The split was agreed upon by the players. There were other showmatches that got a 100€ price pool. I guess the one without one was because the players didn't ask for one, because I can see no match in the showmatch thread being denied money. Also what will you do if FtX simply answers yes to your last two questions? 4head

About the shaming: It happens regularly that someone has an idea that is not well thought out. E.g. separate rating for Astro or Dual Gap. When FtX points out that it is not feasible or not desirable then he will say so. Proceeding to whine about "dictatorship" will accomplish nothing. The reality is that FtX listens to arguments, but they have to be good, if you actually want to convice him. I have not seen yet that he denied proposals without a good reason to do so. Or even blocking people from contributing for that matter.

Your and Suzuji's application feel like you just don't like the current player councillor and want to get rid of him. barely anything of what you wrote warrants to be PC to be able to do it or even falls in the area of responsibilty of the PC. So please answer biass's questions, because I feel they are very relevant to this thread.

FtXCommando

Morax Response:

Since your post is concrete I do not feel the need to do a point-by-point refutation of things. Instead I will first go through your credibility for the position and then proceed to talk about the adjustments you plan on doing for each segment of PC responsibilities.

Ethos:
Your ethos can be broken up to three central facets. First you point to your time as M&M Councillor as well as the time you have invested into the variety of these duties. I have no qualms with what you have said related to these details. However, none of it is relevant as this is the Player Councillor election and not the Creative Councillor election. All this facet of your ethos is good for is evidence that you have consistency on FAF and will not just peace out as soon as you meet the slightest level of pushback.

The second facet relates to the tournaments you have hosted. Since you brought up your past history about tournaments, I feel it’s only fair to go into those tournaments. Your tournament history essentially stops at 2019 which was around the time period where you became a councillor, which is totally fair. I say this to clarify that I’m not ignoring more recent tournaments of yours where you have cleared yourself of any worries about your methodology surrounding tournaments but rather looking at the most recent information available to me. So, archsimkat’s post has touched upon most of my qualms when it would come to you being responsible for managing TDs and assuring people a baseline of integrity in the tournament process. You have a history of completely canceling events because of criticism towards your format or reneging on funds due to being unhappy with tournaments for whatever reason. Of course, doing that is totally within your rights as a private donator, but it is also an action that has consequences in people’s views to handle FAF funds impartially.

Beyond that, I do not think the funds you have put towards FAF is relevant. That plants the seed in my mind that you are using your money as a “pro” for your application and a failure to be elected would result in you not funding anything. Once again, that is your right, but the position is not something up for sale and therefore I would like this fear to not cast a cloud over people’s decision making as they cast a vote.

Finally you have the ethos of being a past member of the Matchmaker Team. This is probably the strongest area of credence you have towards the position. However, you left the position and to me it seemed like you left because you generally left every FAF Discord you were part of and wanted to entirely distance yourself from any contributive element after you left your position as a councillor. You have now informed me that you left because archsimkat failed to communicate with you about the 1v1 pool but I have no real information about the reality of this whole situation.

Tournaments:
None of the tournament adjustments you have proposed are anything different to current policy. It is simply you stating that if you were PC you would keep what I currently do and will into existence the manpower hours and funds to support lower level events. I will assume that the magic manpower and funds will come from you directly. If so, why are you not doing this now? Nothing prohibits it. You know nothing prohibits it because all of the active, regular TDs (including me) have told you they would love to help out where they can but they are simply at capacity in hosting their current responsibilities.

LotS:
Your LotS suggestions ultimately boil down the same problem: manpower. Let’s assume by an U1900 LotS you want a real LotS event. This entails things like operating league invitationals, advertising these invitationals to lower rated players, having new seasonal tournaments, and having mini-LotS events prior to this new LotS. Of course all of this also carries implicit things like casters, money, and organization. You have provided zero reasons for me to believe you would be able to not only do what I currently do with LotS but in fact double the workload (actually more as it’s much harder to organize 1300-1800 players than 1800+) so I discard this as your intention with your plan.

Thus, if these things do not exist, then it isn’t LotS. It’s a U1900 one-off tournament that is just taking place at the end of the year. Is that a problem? No. I would love more tournaments. But this begs the question of why you are not doing such a thing now; it’s not hard to attach such a thing to LotS as an off-event to cover the month before or whatever. But it’s not exactly a “LotS Event” and making it sound like it is after all the work I have done to make LotS a serious community effort bothers me.

Ladder & Team Matchmaker:
My problem here relates to the feasibility of your ideas. Regards to polls and threads about new maps, I do not think the community is going to test and review maps proactively. What you’re essentially saying is to remove the current responsibilities of the Matchmaker Team and outsource it out to random dudes that deem it worth responding in forum threads. I do not understand why this would lead to anything beneficial, the people interested in helping me out now are going to be the people that are responding in this thread. You’re just shifting them around so that they are responding on the forums instead of on Discord and adding additional noise from players that were not vetted.

I’m willing to reimplement polls in order to collect player opinions after having a new map in the ladder as this is where new players will get exposed to the map. This poll, provided decent participation, can then be used as a relevant statistic for categorizing new maps as either classic, common, or experimental.

I also don’t really get your transparency stuff, it just sounds like vague platitudes meant to appeal to the generic user that thinks “more open is more gooder.” What matters is mappers having a pipeline to vetted players that are able to provide feedback on why a map is or isn’t competitively viable. If you want to be considered a vetted player, apply for it. Why add needless noise for mappers to accommodate? Jip has already posted in this thread about how everyone and their mother has a different idea about a map. I want to concentrate as high of a level of people that, while they have varying ideas about what is GOOD gameplay on a map, are able to coherently explain why X or Y decision would lead to worse gameplay in THEIR OPINION. Jip saw me and Tagada argue for like 4 hours about his new 2v2 map about specific pointed things on his map rather than 4 hours of “map is trash I like more open stuff.”

And this carries over to your problem with numeric polls. Let’s look at what I imagine a functional system is:
A qualified team of players that I trust as able to identify solid maps and pinpoint issues maps may have.
Polls to collect information about general player attitudes towards a map in practice

You can promise to poll all 2000 dudes on the ladder I guess, but what I expect you to be polling is like 5 dudes that are highly rated and play ladder a lot. Then you’ll find they say maps are either always ok or are bad. Once again, if these people wanted to give pointed feedback, why don’t they just join the team where that’s what you’re expected to do? Of all your points here, this is probably the one that just makes me ask “why bother.”

Your reset point just reads like it’s generally immature both for discarding resets as an option while also failing to really address any reason why I did the reset. I know you know why I did the reset because I had a several hour Discord conversation about it with you and I also had several discussions with you both on Zulip and Discord about it where you were present.

So let me explain it here for a final time:
TMM was intended to have itself built around global rating from the start. Miscommunication about the features that we needed in TMM prior to a public release resulted in a public release prior to this part of the code being ready. Therefore, rather than simply removing the feature after a public release was made, we simply kept it up and would include it later.

Months later I’m presented with the decision to either include it with a cleanse of the current TMM data or keep the current data while attaching the soft reset on top of it. The logic of removing the current data stems from current information about the issues around 1v1 rating and the deflationary element of it. A lot of the deflation seems to stem from a biased initial sample pool, I wanted to remove any possibility of this happening for the 2v2 matchmaker.

With this consideration in the back of my mind, I began to weigh the quantity and quality of the data available to me related to the current tmm rating. To do this, I got a data dump of all 2v2 ratings from Brutus. The first thing I did was actually review how many people had a sigma under 200 (which is hardly real certainty for a TrueSkill rating) and I got about 90 people. This is not that significant of a data pool.

So with the fact that there was hardly any decent data attached to TrueSkill and the general risk of potential issues that I wished to minimize, I went forward with the reset. I was essentially asking people to play 10 placement games, I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. As it turns out, it’s the end of the world for some players.

Training:
You don’t do any of this. Full stop. As far as I’m concerned I put you in the same box as Suzuji here. I do not care if you promise to upload 60 billion new videos in 1080p and 144 fps.

I am ridiculously active in the training channel to answer questions and help out with general management. I have also written 2 different guides, motivated BH to write his guide, and reviewed some of the guides that were posted on the old wiki. You have done none of this.

In the end I don’t think there’s anything wrong with collecting 50 videos to make into a list, but that sure isn’t a productive way to train anybody. You putting this as your sole action here does not inspire much confidence in you actually training anybody for me.

Also about your new player engagement, let me give an example of how that works. I went through the entire #newbie channel, so about 200 or so people, and directly pinged each and every single one of them. Why was that? Well I needed a <300 player to play with me and Farm in a tournament. I messaged them to ask if they were interested in getting some training. I got 3 responses. Of these 3, I spent several hours going through basic bos and how to look at the game. None of them logged on again. Then I got a random guy on the day of the tournament to play with us.

Training requires will to get better. How do you find that will? You wait for people to be proactive about it. Insert proverb about not being able to make a horse drink water here.

Collaboration:
Promo Councillor:
Want to know why I manage FAFLive? Because nobody else was going to do it. You trying to push the responsibility on somebody else just makes me think you’re going to do that for a ton of the rest of my responsibilities which are technically the responsibilities of other councillors but I do because nobody else wants to do it.

Balance Councillor:
I’d argue there is nobody MORE capable of voicing community feedback to the balance team than me considering how incredibly close I am not only to the councillor but several members in the team itself. Whenever I don’t understand anything about balance patches and need Petric to explain it to me so I can in turn explain it to others, I have zero trouble with it.

With regards to your tournament, that is once again nothing you couldn’t be doing now. You will never get Petric to agree to mandating tournaments to push a patch and I don’t even understand why you would want to mandate that. Push a patch when it’s ready to be released, end of.

The rest of your collaboration stuff is stuff I already do so I don’t feel a need to go into it.

StormLantern

Only Morax's pitch seems to make any sense and can compete with FTX's rationale. But since I have personally experienced Morax to display bouts of childish behaviour when it comes to losing his own games, resulting in him repeatably blaming me of being a smurf and threatening to get me banned, with absolutely 0 evidence or even the slightest reason to suspect me, makes me not at all inclined to give him any real influence. He might have good ideas but as far as FAF concerned he seems somewhat emotionally unstable, unreliable and incoherent. Also FTX did way more and better than can be reasonably expected of a role like this, so why change a winning team?

biass

You’ve failed to answer these questions pointed at candidates and instead are just choosing to troll the thread and throw abuse from a position of moral superiority.

It’s frankly a stain upon the organisation of this election that you’re even allowed to be here, and the way you speak proves how you’ll never truely change for the better.

Debating platforms is the right of any user on faf, the only person who would possibly benefit from no open discussion on platforms is you yourself, because it gives as little a chance as possible for awareness to be spread about who you are and what con you’re playing.

biass

@robustness said in Player Councilor Election 2021:

if there is no open vote, this election will be nothing more than finding out how long Vladimir Putin will be my president. Our hearts demand change. It does not matter who will pull the strap, as long as it is a general vote. No one forbids you to conspire and support one person with your votes, to act in an organized manner. And I do not understand why no one cleans unnecessary messages in this topic!!! Leave only the applications of people and do not spam your thoughts that prevent others from judging the applicants more independently!

The position will be an open vote and you’re allowed to discuss platforms until the 21st. I expect the other candidates to be in here discussing stuff shortly.

If FtX lied about something in this thread, you wouldn’t be saying to not “spam your thoughts” but be taking the opportunity to call it out as loud as possible.

Please don’t associate the election to an authoritarian regime only because you don’t like the current incumbent.

Valki

@FtXCommando For me this election is like a referendum in you, you score 5/5 stars in every category... but when I first ventured back into FAF last year after many years you almost made me leave on day 1 after posting something on the forum - (admittedly I wasn't doing good mentally at the time).

Do I want a Player Councillor who gets things done and is rough to (new) people, or do I want a Player Councillor who is nice to people and we hope for the best on the rest?

How do you think your social mannerism has or has not affected the FAF community?
Do you have any plans to improve this?